Substantial development effort has been expended on thionyl chloride/lithium batteries because of the extremely high energy contained in this electrochemical couple. One advantage of the cell is that thionyl chloride is a liquid and does not cause substantial pressure in the cell. However, thionyl chloride has been found to have substantial difficulty as a depolarizer in cells which are stored for any length of time, particularly at high temperature because of lithium negative electrode passivation. The use of sulphur dioxide as a passivation control agent has been found to prevent this disability at high temperature after long storage times and such a system is disclosed in U.S. Patent application Ser. No. 731,064, filed Oct. 8, 1976 now U.S. Pat. No. 4,309,490 issued Jan. 5, 1982 and assigned to the same assignee as the present invention. That system, however, because of the gaseous nature of sulphur dioxide, requires a substantially stronger cell to deal with the internal pressure, particulary after the cell has been discharged. Typical cells have up to fifty-five or more psig internal pressure upon completion of discharge at room temperature. At elevated temperatures, of course the pressure is substantially greater.